Pass Me By

*Editor’s Note: This essay won third place in our 2026 creative non-fiction writing contest. This year’s theme was ‘In Flux’

I. The first departure

Before I left China for the U.S. in August, 2021, my mother told me that she’s proud. She felt like she had fulfilled her mission, “our generation went from the rural to the city, so that your generation can go from the city to the whole world.”

I came to the United States just months before the Zero Covid policy went into effect, but already knew enough about my grandmother’s forced denunciation of her father, a “counterrevolutionary academic authority” during the Cultural Revolution, about my mother’s foregone dream as a journalist and her fear of politics exacerbated by the 1989 Democracy Movement.

II. This goddamn freedom in America

Now, as I’ve spent five years in the States, I can say that I’m done with this place, sick of it. I’ve had my fun; I’ve had my heart taken and torn apart by the freedom I thought I had found here and later realized it was never real. I felt that freedom when I wrote for our college newspaper and when I went to my first protest. Except that this freedom wasn’t mine. It was too upbeat, simple, and without fear that I felt jealous and uncomfortable. It was a carnival that I somehow sneaked into by borrowing others’ tongues and clothes. There was something I couldn’t hide and they couldn’t see.

I thought if I could purge the fear, the political depression and apathy internalized in me, then I could claim it as mine.

III. Little bugs

蚍蜉撼树, one of the Chinese idioms that I hold dearly, means “bugs trying to shake a tree.” In the spring of 2023, the spring following the White Paper movement, I was happy to be that little bug, because I thought I had other bugs with me trying to shake the tree together.

We climbed on the back of the truck.

I handed out Marlboro Menthol cigarettes, and we continued the conversation on how to extend the influence of the White Paper Movement in the United States. “We should do more stand-up comedy to deconstruct politics.” “A book club on banned books in China!” “More movie screenings?” “Let’s do picnics at Central Park when it’s warmer!” “We must seize this opportunity to educate the Chinese diaspora about Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Uyghur issues.” “I want to write about people in China as specific, nuanced individuals,” I announced my ambition to the group. “Aren’t you tired of how the Western media always pigeonholes us as poor, oppressed people, or ignorant patriots, or dissidents?” I asked. Someone cheered me on, “Yes, we need literature. Words have power, they change minds.”

It might have been the effect of alcohol and cigarettes, too much substance messing with my head, but that night, standing on that truck, I felt hopeful and finally belonged. And then, as always, life took over. The fever was gone. In days we each went back to our universities, the Wall Street, the Silicon Valley, the institutions. We don’t see each other anymore. I think it was out of a sense of shame. What we once shared was raw and boiling. Let’s not be reminded of the hope that was so sincere and intense. Let’s do what my mother says, “Little bugs like us shouldn’t be talking about national affairs.”

IV. Oh history

Born in the l early 2000s, the tumultuous ten years of the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen crackdown – those wounds of history didn’t cut and grow on my own bodies, but it ached close and hard enough to wake me up from the fairy tale of the Great Rejuvenation of China, with the recognition of what the regime was capable of. I had accepted the great fight had been fought and lost. 

Yes, you can grab history by the neck and demand an answer. Or you can recoil from its pile of trash and wait for it to rot, to disappear. And you look at the time that is now, and you look at the ground that is here, and you forget that once you came from somewhere else. Let the bustle and hustle take you over.

Hope was for the naive and the moron. It didn’t have the power to pain me; it was irrelevant. This pain I felt was something safer, nothing but the political depression of living through what we called, “the trash time of history”, it felt so familiar that it became my blanket.

V. A foreign guest

I had gone back to China for a year because I wanted to write about China on the ground. There, my editor made fun of me for letting English grammar invade my Chinese writing. “You think and talk like an American,” they told me, and I was only entrusted with all the international reporting. I had become, or rather, seen by others as one of the “foreign guests” (“外宾”).

Now I’ve left again. Back to writing about China from overseas. Back to English. While dreaming of freedom for China, in the end, I’ve chosen my own freedom abroad. I choose to work with words – words in English – instead of with people, real people from China who see me as an outsider. I let China, and Chinese, be at the tip of my tongue. I let them sink, sink, and sink, till they become the lump in my throat. I choke on them, I swallow, I gnash and let myself be gnashed by them.

VI. Just like being back in China

In America, I had loved the streets of Flushing. It made me feel like being back in China. I passed by the Tianjin Roasted Chestnuts and I thought of how when I was little, on winter days, if I had done well during my piano lesson, my mother would buy me a bag of roasted chestnuts. I didn’t know how to peel them; I would gnaw and bite at them, bits of shell still clinging stubbornly to the flesh. My mother’s hands were deft at everything; she would press lightly in the middle, and the chestnut would split open, obediently offering up a whole, perfect kernel.

I passed by the shops that sold pan-fried Bao, and I remembered the first time my mother took me to Shanghai, we stood at People’s Square and were impressed by the crayfish pan-fried Bao. She demanded that I remembered how good Shanghai was, how good being ‘international’ was. She demanded that I must leave and go out. I went out to America, and found myself eating a pan-fried Bao in America’s Flushing, thinking of her, and how we used to order a bowl of duck vermicelli as accompaniment of the Bao. 

In Flushing I missed China and my mother. It was safe to do so with the distance and time between us.

VII. On the run like a phantom

Now I take my leave from America, albeit temporarily, for Europe. The restless on the run was a result of my failure to be at ease with myself. Once in a while, here in Europe, I feel a kind of shameful happiness. Everyone I encounter, including myself, knows that I’ll leave again. I no longer matter. The irrelevance of being seen as not exactly Chinese, or Chinese in America, but as a tourist, a customer, a passenger, feels somewhat liberating. I wander in the city like a phantom, anonymous, inarticulate, comfortably silenced.